Intuition and the Creation of a Better World

Radin, Dean

... experiments now show that people are much more efficient at making accurate intuitive decisions than previously thought. After describing one such experiment, Cosmides and Tooby concluded that "It may be time to... grant human intuition a little more respect than it has recently been receiving. The evolved mechanisms that undergird our intuitions have been subjected to millions of years of field testing against a very rich and complexly structured environment." These findings, all supporting the idea that there may be many valid ways of knowing, have helped to bring about a rapprochement between meditative disciplines and Western psychology and are fostering a new openness to reevaluating assumptions about the capabilities of the human mind.